Thousands of days a month lost to bed blocking at Peterborough City Hospital

On an average day at the North West Anglia NHS Trust, 65 beds are occupied by patients who no longer need to stay in hospital, according to figures from NHS England.

In May, the latest month for which figures are available, patients at the trust spent a total of 2,005 days waiting to be discharged or transferred to a different care facility - equivalent to five and a half years of waiting time.

The figures show that 94% of these delays were caused by problems with the NHS and 4% by problems with social care.

A 'delayed transfer of care' occurs when a patient remains in a bed after being officially declared ready for transfer.

Patients must be safe to transfer and signed off by both a doctor and a multidisciplinary team, which could include social or mental heath care workers, before they are classified in this way.

Independent healthcare charity the King's Fund has said that this sign off process was sometimes lengthy and there could be many more people who were able to leave hospital but had not been officially declared as ready for transfer.

The figures do not include delays in transferring a patient between wards, or from one acute hospital to another.

Delayed transfers of care can occur for a variety of reasons, including bed shortages at residential or nursing homes and delays in setting up home care packages.

They have the greatest impact on elderly patients. According to the NHS, for a person over 80 a hospital stay of over 10 days can lead to 10 years of muscle ageing.

Across England, an average of nearly 4,500 beds a day were blocked in May, representing roughly 3.8% of all occupied beds. The government target is 3.5%.

This resulted in a total of 139,204 'delayed' days, equivalent to just under 400 years of lost time.

The national rate peaked in February 2017 at a rate of 6,660 beds per day, but has decreased steadily over the past year.

Commenting on the national figures, an NHS spokesperson said: "Patients who are well enough to leave hospital should be able to do so at the earliest opportunity.